The clock is starting to run out on academic summer. There are actually a couple public districts around here that started last week. The one we live in starts this Thursday. L returns on August 7. It goes by fast. Some notes from one of the last weekends before we start worrying about school schedules again.
A Big Birthday
M turned 21 on Friday. She’s all growns up!
She had a bash with friends in Cincinnati that night. She survived the night, which is the key. She told us she never planned on getting super crazy and her focus was on having a good time. Not sure how many drinks she had but she said she told people she had no interest in doing anything close to 21 shots.
It sounds like a fun mix of people. A bunch of sorority girls were there. A group of high school friends drove down for the night. The crossing of streams went well. One of her best childhood friends – who is actually getting married this week – attended, too.
We went down Saturday to take her and her boyfriend out to lunch. Originally I wanted to make this kind of a big weekend, as we didn’t have a chance for a proper family trip this summer. For a variety of reasons we decided to just go down for a brief visit. Part of my original plan was going to a Reds game either Saturday or Sunday. It ended up being a fine decision to skip that, as it was brutally hot all weekend and I believe there were scattered thunderstorms down that way Sunday. There would have been a lot of complaining from everyone but me had I forced the fam to sit out in that. And, honestly, I’m not sure I would have liked it all that much either.
We went to Pepp & Dolores, a very hip Italian place in the Over The Rhine area of Cincy. Between the six of us we got four different pastas, all freshly made, and all were fantastic. Although we let M drink with us in Italy, it was fun to have a legal drink with her in the states. I acted mock offended at our waiter for not IDing her.
We also got to see the house she’s living in this summer. As she was going through the stack of gifts her friends had given her I noticed something was off about the house. Finally I asked, “Is this building tilted or am I having a stroke?” Indeed the building did have a significant lean to one side. M told us you can’t put round things on the floor or they will roll. Her bed is against the wall that she will roll into if she gets to the edge. Cincy is very hilly, but I’m not convinced the house was leaning in the direction of the hill it is built on. A little concerning, but hopefully it stays safe for two more weeks until we move her three blocks to the place she will live in the next two years.
She is in her friend’s wedding Friday so will be back here on Wednesday.
Tour de France
A rather uneventful final week for the Tour. I watched most days. The challenges to Tadej Pogacar never developed, despite him seeming a little under the weather in the last days of the race. I think all his challengers blew themselves out trying to tire him over the first two weeks and had nothing left when he showed the slightest of cracks.
We did get some rain in the mountains last week, which is always the best cycling to watch.
Pogacar beat Jonas Vingegaard by just over four minutes. Vingegaard was nearly seven minutes ahead of the third place finisher. Yawns from a competitive standpoint. As I’ve said before, I’m not a huge Pogacar fan, mostly because he seems a little robotic and uninteresting. With four wins, though, he’s entered the pantheon as one of the greatest ever. He seemed a little surly and uninterested over the past week. Maybe that was because of the relative ease of his win. I don’t know that there’s another rider who can challenge him if he’s healthy. Is there enough there to motivate him to go for a record tying fifth Tour win next year?
As a side note, of course Lance Armstrong “won” seven Tours. He’s largely viewed as a psychopathic liar these days, and any efforts at acting like a normal human being generally come off as pathetic attempts to make people forget not that he cheated, but that he actively destroyed the lives of people who tried to hold him accountable.
So I was shocked that Peacock had a daily post-race show featuring Armstrong and his former lieutenant George Hincapie, who also blood doped back in the day. I always turned Peacock off as soon as each stage was over so I never watched the program.
That seems particularly tone deaf by NBC. Even if you accept the argument that everyone else was doping when Armstrong was riding (I lean this way) I can’t find a justification for giving him a platform. The number of people who are interested enough in him to tune into a show he hosts on a streaming platform can’t be big enough to move the ratings/revenue needles for Peacock. And far more are probably like me and actively turned off by his presence. I think the most likely people to devote time to a program like this are the hard-core cycle-heads, and these people generally loathe Armstrong.
I guess if you view the Tour through the lens that everyone is cheating somehow and it doesn’t really matter, then you can justify his presence.
Home Tech Follow Up
Some of you may recall that when we moved into our new house seven years ago it took nearly four weeks for Xfinity to show up to run the line to our house and get us online. And then it was three more months before they sent someone out to bury our line. In the interim our lawn guys had to carefully avoid it since it laid on top of the ground. Oh, and the guy who showed up to bury it did it all by hand with a spade. We have at least 150 feet of cable running from our house to the main line. It took him over an hour. Throw in poor, post-construction soil, and this guy did a terrible job, putting the line barely under the surface. In the years since it has been cut at least five times by contractors.
Fast forward to our new service with Metronet. Their line was run to our house on a Thursday. The following Tuesday a crew showed up to bury it. They brought one of the big cable-burying machines and had it under ground in less than five minutes. Amazing.
Wednesday I got an email from Metronet saying they were merging with T-Mobile Fiber. Not sure how I feel about this. Metronet was based in Indiana, which was a bonus. We’ve never used T-Mobile for anything and their fiber business is new so I have no idea what Metronet rolling under their umbrella will mean for our service, for customer service, etc. Fingers crossed it just means eventually our bill will go to a different office and everything else stays the same.
Thursday we got our final bill from Xfinity in the mail. Also in the box was a separate mailer from them saying they missed us and offering us some deal or another. I didn’t really read the details, it went straight into the recycling. Their promotions department is on top of things. I guess we’ll be getting these weekly for the rest of time.
We also got two Metronet promotions in the mail last week, so their marketing people haven’t got the message that we’re onboard with them yet.